Expand your startup internationally: Key benefits and strategies

The development cycle for startups looking for significant success often includes a global expansion process. From the start of this article, we want to highlight the difference between the "expanding globally" and "international sales" processes, as this is important for a clear understanding of the topic.

So, "global expansion" is a process that includes not only sales but also communication with local audiences and localization of all processes to correspond to local expectations. At the same time, "international sales" is only a part of the global strategy and is responsible only for a small sector of deals.

To expand globally, startups need to implement a series of actions, including planning, globalization, and localization, which we will overview in detail below. But first, let's review the key benefits of this process and why startup global expansion is profitable. So the main advantages are the following: Increasing the profit because of the vast market share; Diversification of revenue and protection from global risks and force majeure by opening additional markets in different corners of the world; Rising the trust of the customers by increased brand recognition in the world;

These advantages are also significant in the context of "staying afloat," as the failure rate for startups is around 90%. Sometimes, entering a market other than the local market can bring new perspectives.

Key steps to expand internationally

Startups that decide to go global are experiencing an exciting but challenging journey. We defined the general steps to provide a better overview.

Step 1. Development of the globalization and localization strategy.

This step is primary because it defines the entire direction for global expansion and contains:

1. Market research: Evaluate and define the general direction (target regions and countries), potential audience, and possible revenue for each. Choose the current and future priority — this will save you time when you decide to scale globalization efforts.
2. Competitors research: Understand the market leaders and companies that already exist in your segment, as well as their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies for adapting to the local market. Also, learn how they talk to customers, what they say, how they sell, etc.
3. Build a business model for the region you decided to start in. This step includes adapting the product/service, creating a pricing strategy, forming distribution/logistics (if needed), researching local regulatory and legal considerations, risks, and budgeting planning.
4. Create a localization strategy. You will likely need the support of local experts to think through all the nuances and understand the regional peculiarities from the start.

Read more → How to build an effective localization strategy?

Step 2. Globalization and localization strategies implementation

A perfect plan is just the beginning – success comes from flawlessly executing it. In many ways, the final result of global expansion is closely intertwined with the team's expertise and professionalism. So, to make your plans come true, you have to build strong teams and provide optimized and result-oriented processes for them. The composition may vary, but mainly, startups need the following:

1. A content translation team whose tasks will include translation, localization, and transcreation, depending on the content type. We highly recommend reading our article about transcreation for a deep understanding of the difference between all these terms and the cases when they are best to implement. That means your project can require UX copywriters, industry experts, and translators.
2. Localization engineers to control and improve the process and cover challenges from the technical side.
3. Localization managers who oversee all activities from start to finish and manage localization aspects (for example, legal, which is essential for specific industries.)

→ Read more about the legal aspect of localization for industries:

• Medical software localization
• Blockchain localization

Step 3. Choose the best tools for localization

Once you have planned a strategy and built a team to go global, it is a perfect time to choose a solution that will help make your plans come true fast and easy. At this stage, you have a few options:

1. CAT tools for expanding startups globally — this is a group of instruments, such as machine translation, glossary, and translation memory, that help translators and linguists do their work by additional automation.

• The main benefit of these solutions is that the translation speed and quality will rise.
• The main disadvantage of CAT is that this solution is targeted at individuals rather than teams. So, CATs can't assist with progress monitoring or effort synchronization.

Read more → Top CAT tools for translators in 2024

2. Translation management system (TMS): This software combines CAT tools with management capabilities, such as reports, dashboards, invoices, etc. The main advantage of translation management systems is their comprehensive structure, which means that businesses can cover the majority of localization tasks in one place.

Read more → How to choose the best TMS for your business?

Step 4. Final implementation, Tips from Pro

As an additional step, we want to highlight the things you should take care of from the start to simplify the localization in the future.

Tip 1. Integrate localization into your CI/CD pipeline. In other words - build a continuous localization process, significantly speeding up your time-to-market. Once a perfectly built process can cover your localization needs for a long time.

Tip 2. Optimize for multilingual SEO from scratch. The search optimization plan will help build the resource structure, define the priorities, and translate the content more specifically to the audience.

Tip 3. Remember to adapt the customer support and localize UGC content (if it exists.) The latest research shows that 73% of customers want product reviews in their language, and 40% will not buy if the content is in a language other than their native language.

Step 5. Monitor, analyze, and adapt

Even the greatest plans and realizations can be improved. We highlighted a few aspects you must consider from the start.

1. Track performance. This step includes sales and revenue metrics, customer behavior, ROI, etc., and compliance with the primary business plan.
2. Track localization success. Monitor how the localized content resonates with the local audience. Your instruments here are surveys, pools, and A/B tests to check customer satisfaction and detect pain points.
3. Adapt to the feedback. Based on customer behavior and feedback, adjust your offers. This process could include adding or modifying features, adapting tone of voice, providing additional educational content, etc.

Top 3 challenges and solutions for startups to expand globally

In general, the process of expanding startups to other markets looks complex but clear, but there are challenges that startups can face when deciding or have already started going global:

Challenge 1. Manage all translated content throughout the project

At the start of the localization, startups can often use general solutions like cloud drives to collect content, glossaries, and style guides, email to exchange information, spreadsheets to track progress, etc. It can work for the first stages, but as soon as the business needs to translate more content, the time spent on managing the entire process grows exponentially, as does the chance of human mistakes.

Solution: translation management systems cover most of the localization management routine. With Lingohub TMS, you can have unlimited projects for different content types, such as websites, social media, help centers, and mobile applications conveniently located in folders.

Also, users can overview the progress per project, language, and branch to plan the resources and have a transparent overview. All data is stored in the cloud environment and can be imported in the original format or CSV/XLIFF, allowing smooth work with internal and external translators.

Challenge 2. Scale the localization process

Closely related to the first point, the scaling challenge comes when businesses add a new language version(s) or work with other file types, frameworks, etc. Thus, if your team spends X time on translation and organizing the localization process, when adding a new language, you need **X2 resources **to handle it at the same level. What if we say that you need much less with the well-built process?

Solution: With Lingohub, your processes are flexible and easily automated, which allows startups to expand internationally with less human effort. For example, you can:

• Build a workflow that includes text processing steps, such as automatically setting up the status and removing spaces;
• Exclude the human efforts like double spacing, wrong terms translation, and missing tags with automated quality checks;
• Smooth exchange of localization files between your repository/application and Lingohub with built-in synchronization tools;
• Create custom flows with a REST API and many more.

Challenge 3. Finding linguistic experts in time

Even if you have a ready team, a situation can arise when the deadline is approaching, but someone from your linguists is sick or on vacation. Finding the right person and sharing all the context information about the project will take time, and the translator can become a bottleneck.

Solution: With Lingohub, you can order translations for more than 40 languages without leaving an application. The best thing is that all the context data, like a glossary and style guide, will be available for our translators, meaning you will get the top-level result without stress.

To sum up

Companies expanding internationally are on the way to worldwide success. To achieve this with the maximum benefit, you need a professional team and tools that can support localization.

Lingohub was developed with customers in mind, so we provide a vast pool of features focused on automation and improving the customer's processes. Try yourself how this can work with our 14-day trial, or book a demo with our team to discuss your case.